Electronic messaging (e.g. email) is becoming an increasingly popular way for people to communicate with each other. Typically, a message sender uses a computer connected to a network and sends a message to the recipient using a computer connected to the same or another network. The email message traverses the network(s) and is received at the recipients computer. One problem with this type of delivery method is that the message recipient may receive an email message while he/she is away from a computer and is thus unable to retrieve the email message.
One solution to this problem is to allow users to retrieve email messages using a convention telephone. In this solution, a message recipient uses a conventional telephone to call a message retrieval platform which is connected to the user's email server where the user's email messages are stored. The message retrieval platform converts the email messages into voice and delivers the voice to the user via the telephone connection. See co-pending, commonly assigned U.S. patent applications Ser. No. 08/816,608 to Henderson et al., filed on Mar. 13, 1997, and Ser. No. 09/167,114 to Kocheisen et al., filed on Oct. 6, 1998. The user retrieving messages in this manner may also control the message retrieval (e.g. repeat message, skip message, delete message, etc.) using the telephone keypad. With the widespread use of wireless telephones, the retrieval of email messages in this manner has become more convenient. However, one problem with this solution is that email messages are created with the expectation that the text of the email message will be read by the recipient. As such, when these messages are converted to speech via a text to speech converter, it is somewhat awkward for the recipient. For example, listening to the email header information may be awkward. In fact, the user may not even want to listen to the particular message. Wireless airtime is expensive and retrieving long messages in this manner can become costly.
Another way to send email messages to a wireless device is to send the actual text message to the device. Many advanced digital wireless telephones now have a textual display area and are capable of receiving short text messages of about 80 characters. One such service is called the Short Message Service, a standard which is a part of virtually every digital cellular service. One shortcoming of the delivery of email in this way is the restriction of the length of the message. Many email messages are longer than 80 characters and as such they cannot be delivered as text to these wireless telephones.
Thus, what is needed is an improved technique for delivering email messages to wireless communication devices, such as wireless telephones.